Integrating Tables on the World Wide Web

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) allows a person to access a great amount of data provided by a wide variety of entities. However, the content varies widely in expression. This makes it difficult to browse many pages effectively, even if the contents of the pages are quite similar. This study is the first step toward the reduction of such variety of WWW contents. The method proposed in this paper enables us to easily obtain information about similar objects scattered over the WWW. We focus on the tables contained in the WWW pages and propose a method to integrate them according to the category of objects presented in each table. The table integrated in a uniform format enables us to easily compare the objects of different locations and styles of expressions.